Looking for familiar faces

For much of her 20-year career as an educator, Pamela Ferrill has been the only African American teacher in her building.

In 1997, she took a job at Gompers Elementary, where she worked for nine years. This was followed by stints in the district office, Falk Elementary School, Toki Middle School, Chavez Elementary School and the district office again. She was always one of a few — if not the only — teacher of color.

“As a new teacher, I was really eager and excited to be full time,” says Ferrill. “At that time, I was the only African American teacher in the building…. I was the only one.”

Staff diversity at Madison’s schools — especially that of classroom teachers — has been the center of strategic plans, student protests and community conversations for the past several years. As enrollment of students of color continues to rise, the district and the community are asking how to best support and educate the growing number of students of color in Madison.

At the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year, 57 percent of Madison students identified as students of color — which includes Asian, black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian, Pacific Islander, or two or more races.

While the demographics of the student body are becoming increasingly diverse, the diversity of Madison’s teaching staff lags far behind.

As of October 2017, 87 percent of Madison’s 2,774 teachers are white. Sixty-nine percent, or 1,918, are women.

Several factors contribute to the problem. For starters, it is a “nationwide challenge” to attract and retain teachers across the board, says schools superintendent Jennifer Cheatham. “I think that is a fundamental challenge for all of us, it’s not just about diversification.” Candidates of color may also be turned off by reports that Madison is not welcoming to people of color, and by the wide academic gap between white students and students of color.

Research increasingly shows how important it is for students, especially African American students, to have at least one teacher who looks like them.

A 2017 study shows having at least one black teacher in elementary school significantly increases the likelihood that African American students will graduate from high school.

“Black students matched to black teachers have been shown to have higher test scores but we wanted to know if these student-teacher racial matches had longer-lasting benefits,” co-author Nicholas Papageorge of John Hopkins University said in a press release. “Spending just one year with a teacher of the same race can move the dial on one of the most frustratingly persistent gaps in educational attainment — that of low-income black boys.”

The research concludes that having at least one African American teacher in elementary school decreased the likelihood that African American students would drop out by 29 percent. For African American boys from low-income families, it reduced their chance of leaving school by 39 percent.

This opportunity gap — students of color succeeding at lower rates than their white peers — is one of the most dire challenges facing both the Madison school district and the state as a whole.

Pamela Ferrill with Scott Andrew and Destiny Flowers at Falk Elementary in 2013. For years, Ferrill was often the only teacher of color at each school she taught.

Last June, students at West High School held a series of protests calling attention to the lack of teacher diversity, both at their school and across the district.

“Teachers definitely took notice,” recalls Tenzin Kaldhen, a senior at West. “They talked to us about it in class and they emphasized that they’re trying to do as much as they can to relate to us.”

Eden Foster and Mia Corey, seniors at Memorial and East high schools respectively, commend their peers at West for taking a stand.

“It was a very brave thing for them to do and it was very important because many students and teachers hadn’t even thought about that,” Foster says. “They didn’t really know how lacking West is in terms of representation.”

Corey predicts the problem will fester. “More students of color will be joining the school district yearly,” says Corey. “These students need representation.”

For Kaldhen, that representation affects performance. “If you can’t relate to the teacher, the relationship isn’t really there,” he says. “It’s an excuse for the student to not participate as much in class.”

Foster says the lack of diversity is a missed opportunity for everyone. “Education in general is getting different perspectives and different opinions, not just from the students around you, but from the people who are doing the educating,” says Foster. “You’re missing out on an opportunity.”

Corey, Foster and Kaldhen are one answer to a complicated problem. They are part of the district’s TEEM Scholars program, launched in 2015, geared toward increasing the diversity of the district’s teaching staff.

Once they graduate, students in the program continue to get support — both financially and academically — throughout college. If they complete the program, they’re guaranteed a teaching position in the district.

While it’s one step toward a more diverse workforce, the students want change now. “School is for the education of the students, so the district should do as much as it can to help students get the best education they can,” Kaldhen says.

The number of teachers of color hired from 1997 to 2017 by Madison schools has been growing as a percentage of all hires, but lags behind student diversity.

Madison isn’t alone in struggling to recruit teachers.

According to a working paper from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, because black and Latino students are less likely to graduate from both high school and college than their white peers, there are inherently fewer eligible people of color entering the pool of new teachers.

And for people of color that do pursue a teaching career, the majority gravitate toward schools with a large proportion of students of color, the paper argues.

“Researchers explain that teachers of color often choose to teach in high-minority schools, due to their ‘humanistic commitment’ to give back to their own community,” the paper reads.

Still, the Madison school district is trying to make a change.

When Cheatham took over as the superintendent of Madison schools in 2013 she worked to overhaul human resources practices. Everything from recruiting to hiring to retention effectively got a reboot.

Deirdre Hargrove-Krieghoff, chief of human resources for the district, says a consultant’s assessment from the 2013-2014 school year helped the district “unpack” what needed to be done to improve the district’s workforce.

“Out of that assessment came a lot of learning and information and some recommendations for us in terms of how to realize our vision of every school being a thriving school,” Hargrove-Krieghoff says.

That vision included diversifying the district’s workforce to more closely mirror their student demographic.

Marketing materials were updated, focusing less on Madison being a great place to live, and more on the goals and accomplishments of the district. Recruitment expanded into the community. The district attended job fairs put on by the Urban League of Greater Madison. Candidates were invited to mixers. Principals and administration spent time focusing on student teachers, encouraging them to stay in the district after graduation.

The hiring process was also revamped. Instead of relying on traditional, sit-down interviews, the district now uses a “competency, performance-based model” for screening both teachers and principals.

Potential candidates are seen in action — from school walk-throughs to lesson-planning to leading a mock lesson.

“It’s more about people coming and demonstrating their competence rather than how well they might answer a particular question,” says Hargrove-Krieghoff.

Hargrove-Krieghoff says the change helps mitigate bias by focusing on candidates’ skills rather than preconceived notions of what teachers are supposed to look like.

“We’re not going to have completely unbiased interviews — that would be our utopian hope,” Hargrove-Krieghoff says. “But it’s about awareness, acknowledging that bias exists upfront and having that open conversation.”

Before conducting interviews, the district also trains administrators on how to be aware of bias. Interviews are scored with a rubric aligned to performance-based activities. The changes have made the hiring process more objective, Hargrove-Krieghoff argues.

The district has also shifted its hiring timeline. In previous years, the district made offers to candidates in August — much later than other districts across the state, and country. “Most of the highest quality candidates, and most of the diversity of candidates, have already been picked up by other school districts by August,” Hargrove-Krieghoff says.

The district now interviews and hires during the spring. “Several years ago, we didn’t start hiring until summertime. I was almost done hiring at the beginning of the summer this year,” says Michael Hernandez, principal of East High School. “We hired, I believe 10, maybe 11, staff of color this year and the students have noticed.”

Hernandez says it’s important for all students to see a diversity of teachers. “As we start thinking about who kids see for eight or nine hours a day, if they’re able to see quote-unquote ‘themselves’ in professional settings, that gives additional support.” Hernandez says. “It’s important for me that kids get to see everybody, whether you’re white, you’re black, you’re brown, males or females, throughout the day.”

Sennett Middle School teacher Drew Smith meets with student Preacher Tribble. He remembers as a student how “It was amazing having teachers like myself — biracial.”

Angie Hicks has seen the difference teachers of diverse backgrounds can have on students at Wright Middle School, where she is principal.

After filling an opening for a general music teacher at Wright, she noticed a sea change among the African American boys there. “This is the first time that I’ve been here at this school that I have heard my African American boys say they love music,” Hicks says.

The music teacher — an African American male — is a violinist, who teaches chorus, general music, band and orchestra.

“He is engaging them in ways that they can identify with,” Hicks says. “He’s meeting them where they are and appealing to how they learn. They’re getting to bring themselves into that space, and that’s what needs to happen.”

Having people to look up to who share the same racial, ethnic or gender background is something often referred to as “the role model effect” or “mirror modeling.”

And it’s something that the district is trying to nurture with its hiring choices. One way that it is doing that is with the “Grow Our Own” staff-to-teachers program. Started in 2013, the program helps non-certified staff within the district get licensed to teach. Once certified, participants in the program are guaranteed teaching jobs in the district.

Drew Smith worked in the district as a special education assistant for seven years. He took advantage of the Grow Our Own program and is now a sixth-grade teacher at Sennett Middle School.

Smith, who graduated from Memorial High School in 2002, was inspired to become a teacher in part because of his own experiences as a student here.

“It was amazing having teachers like myself — biracial,” Smith says. “I could see myself. These were men of color that were just like me.”

He wants to offer a similar example to his own students. “Growing up in Madison, I had some amazing teachers,” Smith says. “I had teachers that reached out to me, they showed compassion, care, but also that personal touch. Because of that, I owe them something, and I felt that [teaching] was something I could do where if I had a chance to influence and be a positive person in somebody else’s life, that’s what I should do.”

Many teachers of color are extremely sensitive to the need to be a positive role model for students.

“Kids see how you go about your life,” says Michael Jones, a behaviors intervention and supports coach at Black Hawk Middle School. “And what I mean by that is that I can read out of a book, I can give a great speech on something, but kids are more in tune with how I live my life, how I present myself, how I hold myself, how I interact, and I think that is where that modeling comes from.”

Jones says his students benefit from seeing someone like him in a leadership role on a daily basis.

“You can be this kind of steady presence that for some young men of color they don’t have,” says Jones. “I’ve been very fortunate, I can talk to kids about my experiences where I’ve been harassed by police officers, or my experiences where I was the only black person in a crowd of white folks and sometimes the discomfort of that, but then also how you work through that.”

East High principal Michael Hernandez says all students need to “see themselves” in professional settings.

Ferrill says that hiring a diversity of teachers is just half the challenge. “If we’re retaining [the teachers we hire] each year, that’s great, but if we’re losing them, then we haven’t made any progress.”

During the 2016-2017 school year, 287 teachers were hired into the district, and 61 were teachers of color.

That same year, 170 teachers — including 21 teachers of color, or 12 percent — resigned according to data gathered by the district.

The number of resignations has been growing over the past five years, but it is still below the national average.

The actual number of teachers of color on a building-to-building basis — and year-to-year — varies. Ferrill uses Chavez as an example.

Last school year, out of a staff of about 100 people, there were four African American staff members: Ferrill, an art teacher, a special education assistant and the principal. The principal has since retired, Ferrill left to work in the district office and the SEA’s contract wasn’t renewed.

One way to increase retention of teachers of color is through programs that nurture community.

“In order to support our young teachers of color I think we have to make sure that they are connected,” says Jones. “First, they have to be connected to other teachers of color; second, they have to be supported throughout all of their mistakes, and they have to also not be molded into what white society views as an acceptable teacher.”

Jones believes that the administration wants to support teachers of color, but sometimes its efforts are misguided and counter-productive.

“I’ve had a lot of experiences where I’ve been called into meetings for teachers of color and it’s a listening session, and the listening session goes nowhere,” Jones says. “I’m very cynical when it comes to those sort of discussions that aren’t teacher-generated and tend to be more leadership generated because I think what they want is to listen but they still want to make the decisions.”

While he personally hasn’t felt isolated in Madison — Black Hawk has a fairly diverse staff — he has colleagues in the district who do feel alone.

Being one of very few teachers of color can lead to tokenization. “One of the most common forms of inadvertent racism is to place all responsibility on the one staff of color that you have,” Hernandez says. “We’re working at trying to diversify the staff, right? But if you’re not explicit about that, those one, two, six staff, can all of a sudden feel the weight of the 70 percent of the [students] that are of color right now.”

School superintendent Jennifer Cheatham: “You can only hire when you have an opening. That’s part of the challenge.”

In an effort to improve the atmosphere for teachers of color the district invited some of them to an advisory group. Together they created a list of 36 recommendations for the district to improve the climate for teachers of color.

Of those recommendations, the top six include: redesigning Cheatham’s teacher advisory group to better mirror student demographics; continue the work of the teachers of color advisory group; include materials about the group in both the central office and school offices; ensure that equity is required in every school improvement plan; develop an equity strategy and provide budget dollars to support that work; and create professional development opportunities focused on social justice and equity.

Many of those recommendations have already been put into action, Cheatham says.

“We’ve already moved on revamping and strengthening my teacher advisory group, we’ve already moved on making sure that teachers of color are more involved in curriculum and instructional material selection, we’ve already moved on making sure that teachers have stronger voices on leadership teams,” Cheatham says. “We had a leadership institute to kick off the year and we had more educators of color in the audience than I’ve ever seen in the four years that I’ve been here.”

But for both Hicks and Jones, the district cannot solve the real obstacle for achieving a diverse teaching staff: the culture of Madison. Despite its progressive reputation, the city is an unwelcoming, difficult place for many people of color.

“If it weren’t for my family being here, there’s no way I would stay,” Hicks says. “There’s a lot of things to do here, but not a lot of things to do for people of color … it’s hard to get comfortable in Madison.”

Jones agrees that Madison isn’t a great place for people of color. “It’s really easy to look at reports and say, ‘OK, we have this problem,’” Jones says. “I think where the problem lies is the willingness to actually make the change.”

Jones references Madison’s progressive identity as being stuck in the past.

“People want to pat themselves on the back for having good intentions, but not the intent of actually doing the work,” Jones says. “And that’s tough when you’re in a bubble, it makes the culture ill-equipped to deal with things that are different.”

Even with aggressive practices in place, the district has a long way to go before the demographics of its teaching staff more mirror that of the student body.

“You can only hire when you have an opening,” says Cheatham. “That’s part of the challenge, we’ve had fairly good retention rates in comparison to other districts across the country, which is both a strength and a challenge.”

According to the district, 83 teachers of color were hired during the 2017-2018 school year — more than 22 percent of new teachers. Thirty-one schools have increased their number of teachers of color since the district’s diversity work began. Now, just one school — Lowell Elementary — has only one teacher of color.

Ferrill is happy with the district’s efforts, but remains impatient.

“I’m really pleased they are putting things in place, but for people of color and for African Americans, it doesn’t seem like it’s fast enough,” Ferrill says. “We need to keep moving. We know we need to have these things in place in order to start seeing that reflected in student achievement.”